Bully Them Softly

With their lies

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Now, on with the show…

Nonconformity is my middle name. So let’s be crystal—Miss Miller is welcome to wear a tux to prom. And I’m happy to facilitate that by schlepping her to our local formalwear store, which we did the other day. She’s going with a friend—a girly girl who says she’s bisexual but only dates boys. I have overheard these two go on and on AND ON about boys—just like typical teenage girls. What a weird world.

At the store Miss Miller stood on the carpeted platform being measured for a men’s suit, not presenting in the slightest as a dude. As I made small talk with another set of parents whose youngest son, a hulking football player, was also getting fitted, I wondered if referring to my child as “my daughter” would stir confusion in their eyes. I wondered the same about the nice gentleman who helped us out. Nobody blinked. No one flinched. It’s relevant to note that the formalwear store is located in a working class part of town—in a strip mall with a hoagie shop, a secondhand kid’s clothing store and a computer repair store—a nice no bullshit jawn in other words.

Analyzing our outing now, I confess I was grateful to have the opportunity to let it slip into conversation that my daughter is my daughter—that I got to intimate to anyone within earshot that I wasn’t a needy, over-schooled progressive parading around her trans kid. Like, please put away that parenting medal and do not under any circumstances certify that my child—and thereby me—is stunning and brave.

Fellow customers! Staff! We are equal in all ways and I am not above you!

Yes, I felt an itch to establish that I live in reality, and that I would not bully anyone softly to join me in an abusive delusion. I even felt guilty for being a potential Main Line Karen who would force an absurd and obvious lie upon innocent civilians—one they would have to agree with in order to avoid ill will, conflict or fisticuffs.

I am not that monster.

Am I sad that I wasn’t instead taking Miss Miller to try on dresses at the mall? Slutty little slinkies with slits and spaghetti straps? Not really. I kind of liked bringing her to a down-home little tux shop. It had that rebel flair I like. Plus she doesn’t shave her pits. And oh how I wish that were my biggest issue. Plus, if I were to take her to, say, Nordstrom at the King of Prussia Mall, we’d likely be surrounded by one-upping virtue signalers who’d revel to shoot me glaring side eyes for calling my kid a—gasp—girl.

There was a bonus too, a pleasant irony when Vince* took down our information for the tux ticket. He asked for Miss Miller’s name, looking at each of us in turn. Miss Miller and I glanced at one another. Two harrowing years zipped between our briefly locked eyeballs. And then she spoke her real name. She didn’t burst into flames. My heart did burst, but with joy, which hopefully didn’t show. Vince wrote it down. In ink. In triplicate.

If you’d have told me three years ago that simply hearing my daughter say her name would send me into peals of happiness I would have said, Huh? Wha?

The question remains as to whether Miss Miller was also relieved to be referred to as she/her—as her mother’s daughter—amongst sturdy neighborhood folks. Of course I don’t ask.

Yet.

But I am hopeful. For one thing, her last day of school was Thursday. High school can rot in my rearview, for Miss Miller is finally ladled from the ideological soup. It’s not completely over though. There is still the small matter of graduation. And she has a senior project to complete, which she has yet to begin, but that is on-brand for my sweet miracle.

No applause, please.

🤡

Secondly, and this is big—bury the headline big perhaps—driving her to school last week, in a fit of motherly confidence I ventured forth, “Did you know there are people who deny the atrocities of October 7 ever happened? Who say the rapes, and the murders of children never occurred?”

“Oh my God, really? That’s like denying the Holocaust.”

“Exactly,” I said, smiling at her. “That’s what these kids on college campuses are like, while they take the side of Hamas and wave Palestinian flags.”

“There is a real shortage of critical thinking in my generation,” she said, like a wise elder.

I nearly pulled over to bask in her insightfulness. I couldn’t believe my good fortune. How was this wisdom gushing forth from a child who went from identifying as a lesbian to believing she was a gay man?

I went on: “All these college kids—and there’s also this group, Queers for Palestine—if they went to Gaza, do you know what they do to gay people there? They throw them off the tops of buildings.”

“Jesus,” she said.

“Yeah, people say that Queers for Palestine is like chickens for KFC. Meanwhile Israel is the only country in the entire Middle East that’s safe for LGBT people,” I said.

I thought about nudging her to apply her educated observation to gender ideology. It was right there, juicy and ripe, daring me to pluck it from the possibility tree. Ever so slightly, could I?

“Do you have the bandwidth for one more tidbit or are you already tuning me out?” I said.

“You can say a thing,” she shrugged.

“The whole reason for this is because people are simplifying every problem in the entire world to this idea of oppressor and oppressed. And since Israel is successful, and has money, people are saying that they’re the oppressors. And since Palestinians are browner and poorer, they’re saying they’re the oppressed. And when you’re the victim you’re allowed to do anything you want, like rape and murder.”

She was starting to tune out. I could see it in my periphery. The time wasn’t right to venture into gender territory. But the seed was planted. I would water it in my heart.

For the first time I could see the very real possibility that Miss Miller could see her way out of a collection of beliefs so nonsensical that they could not withstand the scrutiny and bright light of critical thought.

Just hold on, I told myself, as I dropped her at school for the last time.

🙏🏼